First-year Transition in Teacher Education: The Pod Experience

Research on student retention and transition in higher education has been an ongoing focus since the 1950s and during the past decade research into this area has gathered momentum as institutions of higher education increasingly recognise the economic and social costs of failing to retain and transition future graduates. Measures to improve transition and retention rates have generally focused on developing strategies to engage students in their studies and tertiary discourses by providing institutional, academic and/or social support. In this paper we discuss ‘Pods’ as an effective and innovative approach to transitioning first-year pre-service teacher education students in regional Victoria. This paper argues that students’ sense of connectedness is greatly enhanced through the grouping of students into Pods in order to promote social and academic engagement and a sense of belonging

Kempe equivalence of colourings of cubic graphs

Given a graph G=(V,E) and a proper vertex colouring of G, a Kempe chain is a subset of V that induces a maximal connected subgraph of G in which every vertex has one of two colours. To make a Kempe change is to obtain one colouring from another by exchanging the colours of vertices in a Kempe chain. Two colourings are Kempe equivalent if each can be obtained from the other by a series of Kempe changes. A conjecture of Mohar asserts that, for k≥3, all k-colourings of connected k-regular graphs that are not complete are Kempe equivalent. We address the case k=3 by showing that all 3-colourings of a connected cubic graph G are Kempe equivalent unless G is the complete graph K4 or the triangular prism

The imperial war museum’s social interpretation project

This report represents the output from research undertaken by University of Salford and MTM London as part of the joint Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, operated by Nesta, Arts Council England and the AHRC. University of Salford and MTM London received funding from the programme to act as researchers on the Social Interpretation (SI) project, which was led by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and their technical partners, The Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London, Knowledge Integration, and Gooii. The project was carried out between October 2011 and October 2012

Time–geography, gentlemen, please: chronotopes of publand in Patrick Hamilton's London trilogy

This paper considers the time and the place of drinking in modern British life, as represented in Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy of novels set in the publand of London’s West End in the interwar years, and through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and with critical nods to Hagerstrand’s timegeography corpus. The chronotopes of pubs and their neighbourhoods, which we term ‘publand’, are discussed initially in their novelistic presentation in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), and then in relation to the ‘character zones’ of the novels’ principal protagonists. The key themes, defined in the paper are the asynchronicity of personal and social relations, the dialogic construction of heterochronicity, and the presentation of a prosaic chronotope. Though the paper is a contribution to literary geography, we aim to contribute to the cultural geographic understanding of the timespace rhythms and routines of everyday leisure drinking, making claims for the wider significance of chronotopic analysis.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2015.104005

A school for humanity: Confronting division and trauma through lived values in Burundi

The Burundi American International Academy is an independent school in central Africa. It was established eight years ago expressly to generate potential leaders motivated to build peace, humanity and economic development in an impoverished country beset by political, ethnic, environmental and development challenges. The purpose of this research is to evaluate progress toward achieving the school’s aims to create such leaders through instilling and modelling the values of integrity, excellence, responsibility, passion, compassion and respect. The study used qualitative approaches including semi-structured conversations, observations, video, questionnaires and follow-up interviews to provide data. Data was analysed using Grounded Theory to identify the characteristics of a model intended to deliver sustainable positive change in social processes through education. Significant findings were that the school had developed a strong, united, persuasive and perhaps self-fulfilling narrative about its successes. This narrative shared between teachers, students, governors and parents, included convincing evidence of deep understanding of the relationship between values and action at macro and micro levels. The strong motivation among teachers and other adult participants towards sustaining its aims was reinforced by evidence of frequent values discussions and values-focussed in-service training. Theory arising from grounded research led to discussion on staff training and curriculum coverage. This included suggestions on involving connections to the school’s humanitarian values and philosophy, cross-curricular approaches to Sustainable Development Goals and closer relations between the subject disciplines. Establishing inclusive values within a privileged minority in a divided and impoverished society and balancing charitable attitudes with aspirations to high status, were revealed as significant challenges for the school. While student admission to North American universities may result in losing of some promising future leaders, the school offers a globally transferrable example of how to establish and sustain a values-creating school

A School for Humanity: Confronting Division and Trauma Through Lived Values in Burundi

The Burundi American International Academy is an independent school in central Africa. It was established eight years ago expressly to generate potential leaders motivated to build peace, humanity and economic development in an impoverished country beset by political, ethnic, environmental and development challenges. The purpose of this research is to evaluate progress toward achieving the school’s aims to create such leaders through instilling and modelling the values of integrity, excellence, responsibility, passion, compassion and respect .The study used qualitative approaches including semi-structured conversations, observations, video, questionnaires and follow-up interviews to provide data. Data was analysed using Grounded Theory to identify the characteristics of a model intended to deliver sustainable positive change in social processes through education.Significant findings were that the school had developed a strong, united, persuasive and perhaps self-fulfilling narrative about its successes. This narrative shared between teachers, students, governors and parents, included convincing evidence of deep understanding of the relationship between values and action at macro and micro levels. The strong motivation among teachers and other adult participants towards sustaining its aims was reinforced by evidence of frequent values discussions and values-focussed in-service training.Theory arising from grounded research led to discussion on staff training and curriculum coverage. This included suggestions on involving connections to the school’s humanitarian values and philosophy, cross-curricular approaches to Sustainable Development Goals and closer relations between the subject disciplines. Establishing inclusive values within a privileged minority in a divided and impoverished society and balancing charitable attitudes with aspirations to high status, were revealed as significant challenges for the school. While student admission to North American universities may result in losing of some promising future leaders, the school offers a globally transferrable example of how to establish and sustain a values-creating school